Friday, October 07, 2005

Mistakes Were Made

This is the White House. If we only screw up twice before breakfast, it was a very good morning. - Jed Bartlet

Since before I took up the hobby, I've been wanting to work with ribbon. All that color, the overlays, and you don't have to wait until November to wear it. So I was in AC Moore the other day and there was this gorgeous 3/4" wide blue and green ribbon with bits of gold here and there. I spent way past my budget for such things, and I got the idea that I was going to make a tank top out of it.

I was in no way prepared to work with this stuff. I started off with the suggested 10 1/2 needles, and the fabric was too dense. Also, if I were to use these needles I'd need ten hanks of this stuff, and that would be even more expensive. I had to go to Woolwinders anyway to look at baby patterns, so I picked up a size 17 circular needle. Now, as those of you who have used these needles know, they're as awkward as those gigantic pencils they made us use in first grade.

I have done five gauge swatches and five other false starts. I've put in at least ten hours of work and at the moment, all I have is a gauge swatch. Granted, I'm not using a pattern, but this is getting ridiculous.

Against my better judgement, I will say something about the disaster on the Gulf Coast. A lot of people are blaming FEMA and the Bush Administration for bad disaster response. While I will not let them off the hook(and I will admit that I have absolutely no faith in Bush), much of this disaster could have been totally averted. The levees were in terrible repair. Bills had gone before Congress that would have funded levee repairs, but they got dismissed as just another series of pork. Scientists knew that this would happen. Not that it could happen, but that it would. But we can't afford to fund local projects. There was nothing we could do about Katrina's approach(and I know that might even be debatable), the levees needn't have broken. They would have been far cheaper to fix than it will now be to recover, and we may have spared almost all of the lives lost.

This disaster was a lot like the Titanic in that a series of unfortunate circumstances lined up just right to create the perfect disaster. There are so many ifs and shouldas, and if just one thing had been different, we would most likely have had a totally different story to read. There are so many people to blame, but we cannot overlook that the whole thing is just a disaster, and other than some investigational work to ensure that it never happens again. Just as the Titanic's sinking brought about monumental changes to ocean liner safety, let us hope that we really do learn something. People will have to be blamed, but more importantly, changes will have to be made.